I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Monday, April 3, 2017

Are US & UK Leaving Muslim-Controlled UNHRC?

British Prime Minister Theresa May is
making history from which there is no turning back in the effort to restore
what she called “our national self-determination” after 44 years of British
membership first of the EEC, the Common Market, and then of the European Union.

On March 29, 2017 she officially
invoked Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty of December 2007 to start the Brexit
process, withdrawal from the EU in accordance with the vote on the referendum
on the issue on June 23, 2016, when 51.9% voted in favor of leaving the EU.

The Lisbon Treaty provides for a member state to withdraw from the EU in
accordance “with its own constitutional requirements.” In view of the
increasingly British criticism of the bias against Israel in United Nations
bodies, especially the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), perhaps Prime Minister
May is considering invoking similar constitutional requirements to withdraw
from them.

Certainly there are some indications of
this possibility. The British government changed its vote on March 24, 2017 at
the UNHRC meeting which issued a “perverse” resolution for allegedly
mistreating Druze residents on the Golan Heights.

May asserted that in the future Britain
would oppose all UNHRC resolutions concerning Israel unless the bias of the organization
stopped. Britain had in the past usually abstained in the resolutions
condemning Israel introduced by the Syrian and Islamic states. Now Britain will
vote, like the US, against them.

The British Ambassador to the UN,
Julian Braithwaite, on March 24, 2017 spoke truth to the organization about its
bias. The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) had passed a series of four
resolutions singling out, as usual, only Israel for violating human rights of
Palestinians, and calling on Israel to return control of the Golan Heights to
Syria.

Ambassador Braithwaite asserted "Today we are putting the UNHRC on
notice. If things do not change in the future, we will adopt a policy of voting
against all resolutions concerning Israel's conduct in the occupied Syrian and
Palestinian territories."

By tragic coincidence the UN bias was
manifest that very week concerning the Islamist terror attack on Westminster
Bridge and Parliament in London that killed five people and injured more than
30. The silence of the UNHRC on this terrorist attack, as well as on the 25
terrorist attacks and incitements in which at least 30 Israelis were killed,
was deafening.

(Bloggers notes: But the UNHRC’s Muslim controllers are aggressively sending
a UN Fact Finding Mission to Burma for alleged human rights violations of
Muslim Bengalis the illegal immigrants from the population-exploding and
rapidly-sinking Bangladesh.)

UNHRC Chief Al-Hussein.

The stronger British position on UN
bias follows the straightforward and unusual remarks on December 28, 2016 by
Prime Minister Theresa May who severely criticized the speech of then Secretary
of State John Kerry. She rebuked Kerry who had blamed Israel for the stalled
peace process, and had disrespectfully referred to the government of Israel as
the most right wing government in Israel history. May regarded this as an
unwarranted attack on the composition of the democratically elected government
of an ally.

In similar spirit to the British
pronouncements, the U.S. State Department Spokesman Mark Toner announced on
March 20, 2017 that the US will boycott a session of UNHRC that will discuss
once again alleged Israeli human rights abuses against the Palestinians.

For some time it has been a travesty of
objectivity that Agenda Item Seven of UNHRC rules mandates that the organization
must discuss alleged Israeli human rights abuses at every session of the
Council.

The significance of this mandate is
that Israel will be discussed regardless of what is happening in other
countries in the Middle East of the rest of the world. Israel is the only
country in the world to which a specific
mandate applies. Alleged abuses of human rights in all other countries are
discussed under Agenda Item Four.

The US is opposed to the Agenda Item
Seven mandate. So far President Trump has not made any formal statement on the
issue, but the Administration is reconsidering its participation in UNHRC.

It is pertinent to the decision on this that President George W. Bush in
2006 refused to join UNHRC, but President Barack Obama in 2009 decided to join,
and rejoin when its first term of three years ended.

The British diplomat Julian Braithwaite
also opposed Agenda Item Seven, pointing out that Israel had been condemned for
its occupation of Golan Heights formerly in the hands of Syria; by contrast
Syria which has been murdering and butchering people on a daily basis, is not a
permanent standing item on the Council’s agenda.

Even more forthright is Nikki Haley, former Governor of South Carolina
and now US Ambassador to the UN. She declared to the UN, “You are not going to
take our number one democratic friend in the Middle East and beat up on them.”
Displaying herself as a new sheriff in town she warned the UN, the “days of
Israel bashing are over.”

But not all nations feel as do the US
and UK regarding the animosity towards Israel. In recent weeks this has been
shown in the Netherlands and in Sweden. In the Netherlands although Dutch
Jewish leaders, fearing the event would incite antisemitism or pro-terrorist
sentiment, and embolden terrorists, urged the Mayor of Rotterdam to cancel a
conference of pro-Hamas group, the
Palestinian Return Center due to be held on April 15, he refused to do. His
excuse was there was no proof that Hamas is involved and therefore he could not
do anything.

More serious has been the little known
activity of Sweden regarding Israel. Some of this has been revealed in a French
report issued on March 29, 2017, "Les Liaisons Dangereuses de Banques
Francaises avec la Colonisation Israelienne." The report makes
recommendations to French banks, insurance and utility companies in relation to
Israel settlements.

The title indicates the thrust of the
report which condemns the Israel colonization, the illegality of the Israeli
“colonies” that restrict the Palestinian people and are an obstacle to the
resolution of the conflict. It concentrates on the Israeli banking system that
it regards as an essential tool of “colonization.”

Three things are pertinent about the
report. One is that the settlements in the disputed area are always referred to
as “colonisation.” The second is that it is based on UN Security Council
Resolution 2334 of December 23, 2016 and
calls on French institutions to respect it
and implement recommendations regarding Israeli settlements. 2334 was
the resolution the Obama administration allowed to pass the Security Council
because it abstained, refusing to veto the resolution.

The third most important issue is the
funding of the report. It was produced by a number of Palestinian and
pro-Palestinian organizations, including the Association France Palestine
Solidarite, French League of Human Rights, founded in 2001, the CGT (General
Confederation of Labor, one close to the Communist Party), and Al Haq, based in
Ramallah and whose director is alleged to have ties to the extreme PFLP (Front
for the Liberation of Palestine).

But it was funded by the Swedish
International Development Cooperation Agency, a government agency of the
Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs based in Stockholm. The Agency has for some
time development assistance for Palestinian economic and social development.

Perhaps the Trump administration will not be able to influence Sweden to
change its anti-Israeli position, but, like the British May Government, it can
and should stick by its threat to pull out of the UNHRC, and by inference other
UN bodies, if they continue their anti-Israeli bias.